3D Beat 'em Ups

[icycalm]

You could also call these "Third-person 3D Action Games", but then you'd be getting into rather close proximity with stuff like Gears of War/Bullet Witch and the like, and even the GTAs/Crackdowns/etc. -- which do have their own, unique labels (Third-person Shooting and Free-roaming Action respectively), but the beat 'em up label is far more unambiguous (and, by the way, just as weapons fighters like Samurai Spirits are still called simply fighting games, so too "hack and slashers" like DMC and Ninja Gaiden are still called beat 'em ups, like God Hand or Bayonetta). But if you have a better name for them by all means let's talk about it here.

So. The DmC demo is up now (at least on Live -- no idea about PSN), and I'll be downloading and playing it in a sec. I generally don't play demos but I am really intrigued by this and I haven't played a brawler in ages, so I'll bend my rules for this one. In the meantime, I thought I'd give you my provisional ranking of all the modern 3D beat 'em ups I've so far played.

1. Ninja Gaiden
2. Devil May Cry
3. Genma Onimusha
4. Onimusha
5. Bayonetta (based on the first two missions only)
6. Otogi (based on playing up to the last stage, or what I think was the last stage)
7. Berserk: Millennium Falcon Hen Wasurebana no Shou
8. Ninja Gaiden 2 (based on playing up to the first boss)
9. Devil May Cry 2 (based on playing up to that tank fight that occurs early on)
10. Devil May Cry 3
11. The Bouncer

Those are all I can think off the top of my head for the moment. If you post other titles below I'll place them on the ranking if I've played them. And like I said, don't hit the roof please when you see DMC2 higher than 3, but that's the impression that I got from 2 after playing it for like an hour or so back when it first came out. All these games will eventually be finished and reviewed, so like I said: the ranking is provisional.

Also, it could be argued that the Onimushas have quite a bit of "adventuring" in them, so they don't belong on the list, but that would make DMC borderline unacceptable too, since it has a little bit of adventuring itself (though of course a bit less than the Onimushas). Personally, I enjoyed the COMBAT in Onimusha, and especially Genma Onimusha, far more than in DMC3, which if I remember correctly has almost no adventuring element, so on the basis of this view I believe it and games like it should be on the list. But of course I draw the line at Biohazard and even Dino Crisis, which have almost absolutely nothing in common with the genre.

Games I haven't played at all but plan to: Devil May Cry 4, Ninja Gaiden 3, Ninja Blade, Otogi: Hyakki Toubatsu Emaki, God Hand, Onimusha 2, 3 and Shin, Berserk: Millennium Falcon Hen Seima Senki no Shou, Madworld, Max Anarchy, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, and possibly some of the God of Wars, but probably only after I've played most of the others.

As a side note, I might also try Ninja Theory's Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (the latter of which is on its way to me right now in my latest Amazon order), but I don't expect to play very far into them. Still, it might be interesting to see how far they've come along with DmC, so giving these games at least a try is a must.

[icycalm]

Forgot No More Heroes and Oneechanbara vorteX, both of which I've actually even reviewed. NMH's pseudo-free-roaming is a sham: the game is essentially a pure action game, so yes, it does belong in this thread. And people were annoyed at me for comparing it to Ninja Gaiden. It's a 3D brawler and I am comparing it to the standard for 3D brawlers at the time duh. WTF else were you expecting me to do? So here's the list again:

1. Ninja Gaiden
2. Devil May Cry
3. Genma Onimusha
4. Onimusha
5. Bayonetta (based on the first two missions only)
6. Otogi (based on playing up to the last stage, or what I think was the last stage)
7. Berserk: Millennium Falcon Hen Wasurebana no Shou
8. Ninja Gaiden 2 (based on playing up to the first boss)
9. Devil May Cry 2 (based on playing up to that tank fight that occurs early on)
10. Devil May Cry 3
11. No More Heroes
12. The Bouncer
13. Oneechanbara vorteX ~Imichi wo Tsugumonotachi~

I am placing The Bouncer higher than vorteX even though I don't remember that much about it after all this time, because the one thing I do remember is that I sat through to the end of it, whereas vorteX I barely played as much as I had to to scribble the review.

Other games I remembered that I will be playing sooner or later are Suda's NMH2 and Lollipop Chainsaw, though as with NMH I doubt I'll be finishing them. I am also debating whether Chaos Legion belongs here, but it's been so long since I played it that I'd need to skim a video to remember it and make that call. As for the rest of the Oneechan games, I can say right now that I do not plan on ever playing them, so when the ranking is published they will go in a special section of seemingly trash games which someone would have to make a pretty good argument to convince me to try them.

And then there's also that Batman game, and maybe even its sequel if the free-roaming/exploration is not too pronounced to take it out of the category.

And of course, having see The Truth in the DmC demo, I will indeed be playing Ninja Theory's earlier games and paying close attention to them.

[Dolt]

I found this guy the other day whilst searching for information on the best 2D beat 'em ups. He is part of a two-man development team making a single-plane beat 'em up called Aztez, but his development blog also has some interesting combat analysis of modern beat 'em ups. So far I've posted his comments on Castlevania: Lords of Shadow [ > ], and you can find the others (including Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising: Revengence) here:

http://aztez.com/blog/category/combat-analysis/

They’re not really reviews: they largely neglect to cover anything but the combat and don’t explicitly establish a hierarchy (in the Castlevania one I really wanted know how it to compared to God of War, as I've seen it criticized as a clone), but I do feel he makes some interesting points and seems to have the right idea about things.

I found him via this timeline that he made:

http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry ... eat-Em-Ups

Interestingly, he has split the 2D period into two eras, the second era beginning with Alien vs. Predator (1994). After the last Capcom games in that era come the first 3D games, which he calls the dark era, then the final era in his timeline (or “Third Era”) begins with Devil May Cry.

For whatever reason (none, as far as I can tell) he includes newer single-plane games in both the second era and third era, e.g. Thor: God of Thunder (2011) in the second era, Oboro Muramasa (2009) in the third era.

[icycalm]

Interesting stuff. From a first quick look, I like this guy (as a critic, that is to say -- as a designer I wouldn't touch anything he was involved in unless it became as popular as Spelunky and I had to deliver a beatdown).

So he is definitely worth reading. I'd put him at about the same level as the Scathing Accuracy guys, which is very high indeed, but not high enough to publish him on my frontpage without some heavy-handed editing. Why is that?

Where to start. Take his timeline (which is divided into "Ages", by the way, not "Eras"). He has Castle Crashers but not Onimusha, and so on and so forth. But it's obviously an early effort and he's missing hundreds of other games, so it doesn't matter. What matters though is that he doesn't seem aware that these are Japanese games he's talking about, and not only have often different names in Japan, but even release dates lol. And he seems to think that the first DMC was called "Devil May Cry 1" lol, etc. Little mistakes, to be sure, but we are talking about analysis here, and the kind of person who treats his subject with such indifference to detail will not have the brainpower to carry the analysis very far. These things go together. You are either a stickler for detail or you are a shallow moron running roughshod over everything. This dude is somewhere in between, as I said, very close to the Scathing Accuracy guys, which is to say far closer to my extreme than anyone else writing about games today, but not enough for me to unreservedly endorse his output.

Or take this statement:

The greatest threat to the beat 'em up has now appeared in the form of "Watch 'Em Ups", a genre of games that looks like beat 'em ups but are actually a wholly different experience.

He thinks that by calling stuff like No More Heroes "wholly different experiences" from stuff like DMC, he is appearing profound. But if NMH is wholly different from DMC, what is Dance Dance Revolution or Civilization? We'd need to invent new words to describe how different they are. Which we are not going to do, so he ends up coming off as an idiot. But there's nothing "wholly different" between NMH and DMC, it's just that the former has a far simpler fighting system, that's all. It's the exact same genre. Hyperbolic idiocies do not help us gain more insight, they merely make things harder to understand. Heraclitus said that the common man sees everything in a fragmentary fashion, and it is only the sage who can see the flux -- i.e. the continuity in all things. "Wholly different" means you are too dense to see the connections, whereas in fact DMC is merely an evolution of Kunio-kun, and No More Heroes a retrogression from DMC -- that is all. Et cetera, et cetera. I am sure when I read his stuff I'll find tons more examples of bad criticism such as this.

Or take this little gem:

The Third Age was ushered in by Devil May Cry 1 and put the beat 'em up back in the spotlight with 3d gameplay that finally looked and felt good. The third age has been a 10+ year renaissance, only losing momentum in recent years.

Let's forget for a second that Onimusha looked and played stunningly even before DMC (since Onimusha is anyway half belt-scroller, half-3D). The "third age" is not a "renaissance", it is a clear-cut evolution. Things are moving forward starting with DMC, straight up ahead, whereas a "renaissance" implies a throwback, which is nowhere to be found since 2001. Indeed, lots of people would have loved a renaissance of the belt-scroller, but as I explained in my Kunio-kun review it's not gonna happen, and with good reason.

So I'll leave it at that for now. If someone wants to take a pic of this thread and my Kunio-kun review and email them to that guy, I think it would be a good idea. He has a lot to learn from these two pages, and if he does so we'll all get to enjoy the benefits from the increased quality of his output.

I'll post more comments here or in the individual title threads once I have some time to go through his stuff at length.


Edit: And yeah, his inclusion of single-plane stuff is tricky, but not always unwarranted. Some of them should probably indeed be in there (Guardian Heroes), while others should not (Odin Sphere lol). Even Viewtiful Joe is a borderline case (as is Dragon's Crown, which he doesn't seem to mention anywhere).

[icycalm]

The first post in this thread was written before I properly played Crackdown, by the way. Crackdown is not free-roaming, it is a third-person shooter just like Gears et al. What little "free-roaming" there is in it is misguided, shallow and superfluous, so it doesn't count. The "feel" of the game, in other words, is far closer to Gears than to GTA.

[icycalm]

He is part of a two-man development team making a single-plane beat 'em up called Aztez

A "single-plane beat 'em up" is a contradictio in adjecto, by the way. The beat 'em up was created precisely by doing away with single planes. Whatever this guys is making is not a beat 'em up.

[icycalm]

Or somewhere I saw on his blog he calls a character's moves "verbs". But a verb is a part of speech, and since when did characters in beat 'em ups get to the end by throwing parts of speech at each other? This is a blatant cry for attention ("L@@K AT ME IM INTELECHUAL" -- actually, you are an idiot) and makes him look retarded and pathetic. How can he expect to be taken seriously if he randomly blurts out such nonsense?

[icycalm]

He is right in his last claim here though:

The Third Age was ushered in by Devil May Cry 1 and put the beat 'em up back in the spotlight with 3d gameplay that finally looked and felt good. The third age has been a 10+ year renaissance, only losing momentum in recent years.

The genre has indeed been losing momentum, and the million-dollar question is why? And I have no doubt in my mind that he would blame it on the "watch 'em ups" or some such other scapegoat, just like every other specialist. The truth however is that the genre has been overshadowed by much higher genres, and is therefore in decline. Which genres? The Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto ones lol.

"B- B- BUT THESE ARE POPULAR GAMES!"

Exactly, and that's why they are so much better.

[icycalm]

lol he has Castle Crashers in the same age with Metal Gear Rising lolololol. Can you say "braindead"?

Castle Crashers is worse than Renegade lol. It should be in the Zero Age, along with all the other "indie" monstrosities.